


You Are My Joy

by Miaou Jones (miaoujones)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Divergence - VLD Season 8, First Kiss, Fix-It, Love Confessions, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 14:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17024331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miaoujones/pseuds/Miaou%20Jones
Summary: in every universe, in every reality, in every possible world, keith just wants shiro to have everything he wants.





	You Are My Joy

the meeting ended some time ago. several minutes, at least; long enough that the room has emptied out, except for shiro. and you. he's looking down, eyes focused on the readout he's scanning. you don't say anything; you like his focus, you like the way it makes him look. not just his eyes, not just his face. his whole body, his whole _self_ has been focused ever since he took command of the atlas. 

it's not the new arm, although yes, he's been different since he got the arm. it's not the new body, or even having a body again, though of course that's made a difference too. it's not—

it's not anything that came before it. it's the atlas. the atlas has made shiro himself again. you haven't seen him like this since before he left for kerberos. even when you—even when he came back to earth, when he was in his original body, he wasn't fully himself. they took something from him when he was in captivity. they took more than his original arm. he was still shiro. (even the clone was still, in many ways, shiro...) but. 

he's not just shiro now. he's himself. you smile. you can't help looking at him and smiling. 

"what?"

you startle at the sound of his voice. you thought you were looking right at him but he's caught you off guard, glancing up without moving his head; he's caught you looking at him and smiling. "what?" you return, letting your eyebrows arch as your mouth smooths into a straight line.

he shakes his head, his own smile flashing wider before it fades as he looks down again. 

and that's it. that's the whole conversation. you exchanged words without saying anything, and now it's time for you to leave the room. you can't justify standing here any longer, can't keep looking at him like this.

"what do you think of curtis?" you hear yourself say.

"curtis?" shiro is looking at you again. his brow settles as he says curtis is a fine officer and gives you a brief catalogue of curtis' professional qualities and virtues. "if you're thinking of him for a mission—"

"i like the way he looks at you," you tell shiro.

you don't know what you expected shiro to do with that. he doesn't seem to know what to do with it either. 

then he says, "how does he look at me?"

you think it's genuine. you think shiro genuinely doesn't know how curtis looks at him. you don't know curtis well, or even at all, but you have a feeling curtis is never going to put the look into words for shiro. it's not yours to do, and you aren't good with words anyhow, not really. 

"he looks at you like he's lost at sea and you're the star he knows can guide him home."

shiro laughs. that's not what you wanted (see, didn't you say you weren't good with words?). "i don't know what that means," shiro says, grin not yet faded entirely.

"he looks at you like he thinks you're beautiful." there's more to it; so much more. but you don't know the words, so you stop there.

"okay," shiro says.

it's not, though. it's not okay. nothing feels okay and it hasn't for a while and you don't know how to make it okay. you don't know why you thought this would work.

"he likes you," you say, stubbornly soldiering on. 

shiro looks at you. he puts down everything and looks at you, and you feel like it's been a hundred years since he's _looked_ at you...

a crinkle appears on his brow. "you really think so?"

the air sucks out of you. his words have unexpectedly knocked out all of yours, and your breath too. 

you nod.

one corner of his mouth quirks up, like it's trying to smile, but it just hangs there for a moment before slipping back down. his hand floats up and hovers as he rubs the back of his neck. "how do you know?"

it's funny, you always thought you needed to be able to breathe to speak. you thought you needed to breathe to live. it's funny, but you don't laugh. you don't even smile. "i've seen the way he looks at you." you already said that. you don't want this conversation to go circular so you add, "i used to see that look a lot at the garrison."

"ha!" 

it's a word more than a laugh but shiro's mouth manages a grin to go with it, so you come up with a grin too. these are the most words you've exchanged with him since. since he got his body back. you're not ready for this conversation to end yet, so you nod and say, "so many cadets looked at you like that, at one time or another."

this time the sound is more a laugh than a word, though the syllables of "ha ha" are still distinguishable. "many, huh? but not all." shiro's mouth quirks sideways, then snaps back into the grin. "not you, for example, right?"

"i've looked at you like that," you say before you can stop yourself. the thing that hurts, you realize, is not that it's true but that you had to say it. it's not the saying it that hurts; it's the fact that shiro didn't know. he never saw the way you look at him... you tried to hide it from him, but you didn't know succeeding was going to hurt so much.

shiro glances down but doesn't move to pick up anything. you aren't sure he's even looking at anything. "so you had a crush on me as a kid, huh?"

his voice inflects up but you know it's not a real question so you don't answer him. you don't correct him. 

"you know," he says casually, scrolling through schematics on the display now. "i thought, for a moment, when you came back, and i came back." 

you wait for him to go on. you feel like your breath has come back and you're holding it. 

"what?" you finally say.

he sighs and the way he does almost makes you wonder if shiro was holding his breath too. then he grins and gives you a glance and says, "never mind," and looks at the display.

you step closer. you were already pretty close but you step closer, right into his space. he looks up when you do. you know what you're going to do but you want to be sure he does too, so you wait for the furrow of his brow to smooth out before you lean in.

he leans away. he doesn't step out of the space you're sharing but he leans back. 

"no?" you ask him.

he swallows and laughs at the same time, and it comes out kind of choked. he swallows again and looks at you. he looks at you and you're looking at him, and you're not hiding the way you look at him. "i don't know." his words are quiet and trembling, and you want to gather them up and protect them. 

you want to protect him. you've always wanted to, and it meant the world—it meant the universe and beyond to you, when he let you.

you're standing so close to him right now, you can see him trembling. you're not going to try to kiss him again. you just want to hold him; you want him to let you. you go to put your arms around him, and one of them slides through the space in his new arm, your hand falls through the space, touches down on his waist. your other hand found his shoulder on its own, because that's how you've always touched each other. you're in a classic dance pose, you realize, and you knew you were bad at this stuff but you didn't know you were hilariously bad. 

you can't laugh but you do manage to smile and you know you should say something but you don't know what. you take your hands away and you don't know what to say because you're out of words. you have words, actually. but you can't say them to him again (though maybe, technically, you haven't said them to _him_ —but you know he heard them, that one time...). "shiro," you say, because that one word, at least, you can say.

he moves. in, not back. he's so close that you can feel his breath when he says your name. he's too close to look at so you close your eyes. you're not sure whether his eyes are open or closed. so you ask him.

you think he's going to laugh and even though that wasn't your intention, you don't mind because you like his laugh. 

he doesn't laugh, though. "closed," he says, and you can feel his breath, you can feel the soft tickle of his forelock, the comforting solidity of his forehead as he rests it against yours. this; oh god, _this_... you could stand here like this with him for a million years. you don't need anything else. you just need him standing with you.

you think you should tell him this. he deserves to know. he deserves so much, everything; you want him to have everything he wants. you don't know how to tell him that but you think you should, somehow. you draw a slow breath, deep enough for all the words you know and all the ones you don't—

and the breath sucks out of you again, because shiro's mouth is on yours. or yours is on his. you're honestly not sure which of you moved, but your mouths are touching, and it's not accurate to say that the breath has sucked out of you because you're inhaling—you're inhaling shiro's breath, you can feel his breath in your mouth and your lungs. you can feel his fingertips on your face, you can feel his palm cradling your jaw, guiding you.

you follow him. you try to follow him even when his mouth parts from yours, then when you can't, you pull back too and open your eyes. 

he's looking at you. he's still holding your face with his human hand. then that hand drops away and he's only looking at you. 

and you're looking at him. he can see how you're looking at him and you can see how he's looking at you. you start to wonder if he's ever looked at you like this before, but it doesn't matter. all that matters is that he's looking at you like this right now. 

he's looking at you like he wants to look at you for the rest of his life.

you smile. yeah, you want shiro to have everything he wants.


End file.
